Nanook of the North (Northern Productions, Révillon Frères, Pathé, Film Preservation Associates, 1922)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, March 29) my husband Charles and I watched a Turner Classic Movies three-film triple bill featuring W. C. Fields and then saw a “Silent Sunday Showcase” presentation of a quite different sort of film: Nanook of the North, Robert J. Flaherty’s pioneering non-fiction (sort of) movie about the Inuit of the Ungava Peninsula in northern Canada in general and one Inuk (“Inuk” is just the singular form of “Inuit”) in particular, the hunter Nanook. The 36-year-old Flaherty had been an explorer for years, specializing in northern Canada and working for mining companies interested in locating and exploring iron deposits for extraction and conversion into industrial steel. Over the years he had got to know a lot about Inuit culture, and on one of his expeditions he packed a movie camera and used it to film the Inuit’s lives, especially the hunts on which they tracked down the animals that were their sole source of food. Flaherty actually edited some of his footage into a travelogue and sent a positive print to Harvard University for a special screening, but later he accidentally burned either part or all of his negative. Flaherty later decided it wasn’t much of a loss because the film wasn’t very good anyway. As Flaherty said later, “It was utterly inept, simply a scene of this and that, no relation, no thread of a story or continuity whatever, and it must have bored the audience to distraction. Certainly it bored me.” Flaherty talked it over with his wife Frances and hit on the idea of making another movie, and this time centering it around one Inuit family and their struggle to survive in what he called “the bitter climate of the North, the bitterest climate in the world.” In 1920 he met Thierry Mallett, an executive with the French company Révillon Frères, at a cocktail party and outlined his idea for a film about Inuit life. Révillon Frères had chafed for years that their principal competitor for outfitting Arctic explorers, the Hudson’s Bay Company, had the huge advantage of free advertising in every atlas that showed “Hudson Bay.” Mallett introduced Flaherty to John Révillon, who agreed to finance the film if it could be credited as “Révillon Frères Present.” In the meantime makers of cinematic equipment had improved the panoramic tripod so a camera could be moved both horizontally and vertically with a single arm, an innovation that became basic to Flaherty’s filmmaking technique.

Flaherty decided not only to shoot Nanook on location but to develop the film on site and show it to the Inuit who were playing the principal roles. “The showing of the rushes to the actors was a deliberate part of a philosophy of filmmaking which Flaherty had evolved during his years of waiting,” said Flaherty biographer Arthur Calder-Marshall. “Nanook was to be a film of the Inuit by the Inuit, ‘of the people, by the people,” insofar as that was possible.” Flaherty was helped by the fact that the standard film of the time was orthochromatic, which was insensitive to red light, so it could be developed relatively easily under red safelights. (Later, with his next film Moana, Flaherty pioneered the use of panchromatic film, which produced deeper, richer, and more varied greyscales but needed to be developed and fixed in total darkness.) Flaherty also discovered the Akeley camera, which he chose for Nanook because it was lubricated with solid graphite instead of oil, which would have frozen on the Arctic locations. To cast his film he hired an Inuk hunter named Allakarillak, though he renamed him “Nanook” after the Ungava Inuit word for “bear.” To play Nanook’s wife, or at least his domestic partner (whatever arrangements the Inuit had for recognizing relationships is unclear from the film), Flaherty chose a woman named Alice Nevalinga or Maggie Nujarluktuk (sources differ) and named her character “Nyla.” (The Wikipedia page on Nanook of the North quotes people associated with the filming of a 1988 documentary called Nanook Revisited and claims that both Alice and Cunayou, who plays Nanook’s and Nyla’s daughter, were “common-law wives” of Robert Flaherty, and Alice/Maggie had actually had Flaherty’s son.)

The version of Nanook Turner Classic Movies showed was a 1998 reissue prepared by David Shepard for a company called Film Preservation Associates, and it featured a new musical accompaniment by Timothy Brock. It contained a written prologue Flaherty almost certainly added after the original release, which made the claim that two years after the film was made Nanook t/n Allakarillak had died of starvation in Ungava while hunting for deer. Modern sources have questioned this and said he really died more prosaically of tuberculosis. The film has been criticized for showing the Inuit as living at a lower level of technology than they actually did. According to Calder-Marshall, “Flaherty found that Nanook and the rest weren’t really dressed in Inuit clothes and he had to go to great trouble and expense to procure for them the clothes which they should be wearing if they were to appear on the screen as genuinely Inuit as they in fact were.” Flaherty also showed the Inuit hunting for walruses and seals with harpoons when by 1920 they had access to firearms. Returning to New York after spending 1920 shooting Nanook in the Arctic environment of Ungava, Flaherty spent 1921 editing it and getting Carl Stearns Clancy to write the intertitles. He had done all the other technical work himself, writing, directing, photographing, and editing the film, and had trained Inuit people to do the grunt work of actually developing the film on site. Flaherty showed the finished movie to various American studios looking for a distribution deal, which he didn’t get. The studio that finally accepted the film for release was Pathé, which like Révillon Frères was French-owned. Fortunately for Flaherty, Madame Brunet, wife of the president of Pathé, loved the film and insisted that her husband buy it. Flaherty was able to place the film with Samuel “Roxy” Rothafel by using a stratagem of packing the audience for the screening with carefully selected friends who would applaud at the critical moments, “The plan succeeded,” Calder-Marshall wrote. “When the lights went up in the Capitol projection room, Roxy babbled words like ‘epic’ and ‘masterpiece.’ He booked it.”

Later Pathé decided to ensure the success of Nanook by block-booking it, a system of coercion all the major studios engaged in until the U.S. Supreme Court ruled it illegal in the late 1940’s. Pathé had just accepted Harold Lloyd’s first feature, Grandma’s Boy, for release, and the studio told theatre owners they couldn’t get Grandma’s Boy unless they took Nanook along with it as a double-bill partner. On its release, Nanook got great reviews at a time when film criticism was still in its infancy. As Robert Sherwood wrote in The Best Moving Pictures of 1922-1923, Nanook “came from a hitherto unheard-of source, and it was entirely original in form. … Here was drama rendered far more vital than any trumped-up drama could ever be by the fact that it was all real. Nanook was no playboy enacting a part which could be forgotten as soon as the greasepaint had been rubbed off; he was himself an Eskimo struggling to survive. The North was no mechanical affair of wind-machines and paper snow; it was the North, cruel and terribly strong.” Other critics were less kind; Iris Barry, who would become curator of film for the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and do more than any other person to establish that films were a legitimate art form and museums should preserve them as they would artworks in other media, had previously worked as a secretary for Vilhjalmur Stefansson (born William Stephenson), a Canadian explorer and professor of Icelandic descent, who had reportedly called Nanook “a most inexact picture of Eskimo life.” Barry sneered that “Nanook was actually taken in the latitude of Edinburgh and acted by extremely sophisticated Eskimos.” Nanook’s defenders pointed out that, while Ungava was at the same latitude as Edinburgh, its climate was considerably colder and more bitter. Flaherty conceded that he’d had to fake some shots, notably the ones showing Nanook and his family inside an igloo. First he’d had Nanook build an igloo that was considerably larger than the 12-foot ones traditionally used by the Inuit. Then, when Nanook couldn’t build an igloo large enough for Flaherty’s purposes (he needed one larger than normal to accommodate the heavy, bulky cameras of the period) without its roof collapsing, Flaherty agreed to cut away part of the igloo, so in the film you can see Nanook and his family breathing with steamy breaths and exposed to the cold climate as they wouldn’t have been in a normal igloo.

What comes off most strongly about Nanook of the North today is how vividly Flaherty dramatized Nanook’s and his family’s constant struggle to survive. Once they kill the walrus in an early scene, they don’t wait to drag the beast back to base camp, let alone cook it; they cut its flesh open (using knives made of whalebone, which they wet down with their spit to lubricate them because otherwise the knives would become brittle and shatter in the Arctic cold) and eat it raw on the spot. Later, when they kill a seal, along with eating it themselves they also throw bits of its meat to their dogs (I’d been wondering how they fed the dogs), which they use as beasts of burden to carry their sleds. They also carefully preserve the hides of these creatures because those are the main items they have to offer at the white-run trading post which is their only interface with Western civilization. There’s a famous scene in the trading post in which Nanook and his family marvel at a phonograph, try to wrap their minds around the fact that whites have figured out how to record their voices on shellac and clay discs, and Nanook tries to nibble at one of the records. Nanook of the North has often been called the world’s first true documentary film (though it would be in reviewing Flaherty’s next film, Moana, that British film critic John Grierson, later a director himself, would write that the film “has documentary value,” thereby establishing the word “documentary” as the genre name for non-fiction films in general), though it’s also been called an example of “salvage ethnography,” an attempt by using survivors of a lost culture to dramatize what that culture was like before white people “discovered” it and frequently loused it up. Nanook of the North remains a haunting film today, and one that makes its effect by its very simplicity. It doesn’t have a plot as such, merely the actions of a family living constantly on the thin edge of starvation and matter-of-factly doing what they have to do to survive.